It was a total shambles - and Fletcher must pay the price

Both on and off the field and in the results of the play in this and in other matches, the superiority of the Australia team was never severely challenged. They proved themselves beyond doubt the better combination, better and more reliable with the bat, better and more dependable in the field with better and more suitable bowling equipment for Australian conditions of play. If that sounds even more pompous than usual then that is the Sydney Morning Herald for you, in March 1921 in the immediate aftermath of the only previous whitewash - administered upon England by Warwick Armstrong's side - in the history of the Ashes. Nothing much changes, does it.

Some things will have to, though, if England are going to recapture the Ashes two years hence and establish themselves at the top of the tree, the objective set out in the mission statement of the then England and Wales Cricket Board chairman Lord MacLaurin some years since. Retirements of key players, particularly their two bowling geniuses, mean that the Australians will fall back closer to if not into the pack and anyone who has seen some of the play, for example, in the ongoing series between South Africa and India will realise that in spite of this result England are a match for anyone else.

Already, though, the machinery is being put into motion to ensure that such a debacle as has been witnessed these past few weeks (and which is sure to carry on, only more so, through the coming weeks of one-day cricket) does not happen again. Even as the teams were preparing for play on what inevitably proved the last day here, a quorum of the ECB's executive committee, the body with overall responsibility for delivering the board's strategic plans, was meeting at a Sydney hotel to discuss the immediate setting up of a full-scale inquest not just into the tour itself but the whole structure of the England set-up and its relationship with the counties.

This review is to be chaired by an independent person with credibility both in business and cricket, who will select the other committee members. The brief will be to examine the England structure, from coach, through players, central contracts, the increasingly influential role of the Professional Cricketers' Association, an assessment of the value for money and roles of the many ancillary staff, including management, trainers and coaches, and the nature of media relations.

The intention is to deliver the most robust, stringent overhaul and streamlining of the way in which the international game in England is prosecuted. There will be a good number of jobs on the line now.

One of these may be the coach Duncan Fletcher, who has in the course of seven years taken the England side from a laughing stock to the adulation in Trafalgar Square. He has been a brilliant coach, bringing solid business practice and cricketing expertise to the structure of the team and its environment, and gradually the players have responded. But the pinnacle was that day at The Oval 16 months ago. Since then, persistent injuries and illness have disrupted the team that was forged, and if from that has emerged talents such as Alastair Cook, Monty Panesar and Paul Collingwood, then it cannot compensate for the loss of the most potent pace attack that England has ever possessed or its cussed captain.

England lost their focus in Pakistan, survived on their wits in India, failed to nail Sri Lanka at home and then overwhelmed Pakistan. It was not enough. The winning habit, that Australia had so relentlessly resumed in the same time-frame, had deserted them.

The implication now is that they have become stale, complacent after the Ashes win, and that the real depth of talent is shallow. For the manner in which the team were prepared (or not) for this series, Fletcher must take responsibility and also for the strategies and selections. Each of these is open to debate but he has responsibility to get it right.

The belief is that he has lost the confidence of the players and he in them and that his relationship with Andrew Flintoff has not been as cordial as with previous captains. Staleness has been allowed to creep in and that is unacceptable.

The timing of his departure, though, would be a sensitive issue. He is a full-time ECB employee, on a four-year rolling contract and, at an estimated quarter of a million pounds a year, will be expensive to unseat. His business in Australia is not finished until the one-day series ends early next month and then the World Cup.

The final of that competition is less than a fortnight before the first Test of another hectic summer. Finding a replacement of sufficient calibre within such a narrow time-frame would be hard, although several top contenders would then be out of contract with other countries. If Fletcher is to be replaced, however, the search has to begin now. With a change of coach and what one might anticipate to be review group recommendations should come a paring down of the entourage which now accompanies England. If in 2005 Australia lost the plot by becoming too clever and losing sight of the fundamentals, then the same can be levelled at England, with the infamous leaked bowling plan as evidence. What credence can be placed on a member of backroom staff who spells "nicks" as if referring to ladies' underwear. Some of these people have to go.

Still, though, we come back to the Sydney Morning Herald and its assertion of 86 years ago. To beat Australia last time, England needed to be at the top of their game and the opposition off theirs, they needed good fortune, and good health. To take them on in Australia they needed all this and more. Instead they found an opponent so focused, so utterly dedicated to exacting not just revenge but the infliction of humiliation that even England's best side at its peak might not have been enough second time around.

Ricky Ponting and his side demonstrated team play in excelsis, where every man did his job, and the whole became greater than the sum of its parts. Each time England asked a stern question (and there were occasions) an Australian answered and some. And that, in what was an extraordinary performance, is the most extraordinary thing of all.

Whitewash in numbers

47.25

Average runs Australia put on for last five wickets of every full innings

15.27

Average run haul of England's tail

1

England batsmen with better average than Shane Warne's 49. Only Kevin Pietersen topped 50 for the tourists

91.60

Mike Hussey's batting average

9

Number of centuries recorded by Australian players; England managed only three

102

Steve Harmison's average strike rate; Stuart Clark's was 45

10

Number of wickets Harmison took compared with 17 in the last Ashes series. His bowling average nearly doubled from 32.39 in 2005 to 61.4

17.03

Average number of runs that Clark conceded per wicket

49

Average more runs per wicket conceded by Ashley Giles than Monty Panesar